12 Things You May Not Know About Your Favorite Christmas Movies, Part 5

Its been three years since we looked into trivia from your favorite Christmas movies, so now seems like a good time to add some more movies and trivia to the list.

Before, we covered some of the more obvious Christmas movies like 'Home Alone', 'Christmas Vacation', 'A Christmas Story', etc. Since then we've realized we missed some other beloved Christmas films, and a few new popular ones have been released since then. This time we have a Christmas movie that inspired the horror slasher genre, an actor suffering for his art, stolen movie posters, and a character being downgraded out fear of toy sales.

1. Warner Bros. had to repeatedly send new Catwoman posters to various cities because the bus stop ads were regularly stolen. It became so bad that police officers had to be assigned to patrol the bus stops to prevent people from breaking into the poster cases. Due to this, the large scale Catwoman ads are high-value collector items.

2. Stan Winston said that once while his crew was collecting the mechanical penguins after shooting, they found one of the live penguins snuggled up asleep next to a mechanical one.

5. The first major Muppet project after the death of Jim Henson. Steve Whitmire was nervous about taking Henson’s role as Kermit the Frog. The night before Whitmire was scheduled to record Kermit’s songs for the film, he had a dream where he met Henson in a hotel lobby and talked to him about being nervous. Henson assured him that the feeling would pass and Whitmire woke up with renewed confidence in his ability to play the part.

6. Prior to production, Michael Caine told Brian Henson that he planned to take the part of Scrooge seriously, comparing it to as if he were working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and as if his costars weren’t puppets, which Henson was pleased to hear. Caine was also unaware that the film was Henson’s first directing job, later admitting to being greatly surprised and impressed with his work when he found out.

7. Director Bob Clark, who also directed ‘A Christmas Story’, had an idea for a sequel where the killer would escape from the mental hospital 10 months later and return to the house, calling the film ‘Halloween’. Clark was good friends with John Carpenter who ran with the idea four years later and created ‘Halloween’, using several techniques and scenes from ‘Black Christmas’, such as the opening POV shot through the killer’s eyes.

8. ‘Black Christmas’ was reportedly Elvis Presley’s favorite holiday horror film and watched it every Christmas. His family keeps the tradition alive and watches it every year in his memory.

9. Alec Guinness went on to say that he didn’t enjoy working on the film as Marley because of the extended time it took to film and the harness used to create his character’s spectral floating, which caused Guinness to suffer a double-hernia that required surgery.

10. It took three hours a day to apply old age makeup to Albert Finney, who was only 34-years-old at the time of filming.

11. Tony tells a young boy with glasses that he loved him in ‘A Christmas Story’. Peter Billingsley, who played Ralphie in ‘A Christmas Story’, served as an Executive Producer on the first ‘Iron Man’ film and had an unrecognizable cameo as the lab tech who tells Obadiah Stane that they don’t know how to miniaturize the arc reactor like Tony did.

12. Rebecca Hall’s character of Maya Hansen was originally supposed to be the lead villain, but her part was reduced and the lead villain was made male after studio heads insisted that young boys wouldn’t buy an action figure of a female character.